One of the most obtuse superstitions is the superstition of educated people is that a human can exist without faith.

True religion is the establishment of a relationship between man and the infinite life that surrounds him, and which binds his life to this infinity and guides his actions.

If you feel that you have no faith, you must understand that you are in the most dangerous position in the world, in which only man can find himself.

People can, and do, live the rational and harmonious life natural to man only when they are united by their understanding of the meaning of life; in other words by a shared understanding of the meaning of life that satisfies the majority of people equally, and in the guidance for conduct that follows from it. But when the inevitable happens (which must happen since the explanation of the meaning of life and the resulting guidance for conduct is never finalized but becomes continually clearer) – when it happens that the understanding of the meaning of life, having become more precise and definite, demands a code of conduct that differs from before, while the life of the people, or of nations, continues as before, then their lives become discordant and impoverished. And the disparity and impoverishment continue to increase so long as the people fail to assimilate a religious comprehension and code of conduct appropriate to their times, but continue living according to guidance originating from a former, now outdated, understanding of life, and moreover try to adopt a religious outlook appropriate to the times by inventing an artificial understanding of life that might justify their way of life, but which no longer corresponds to the spiritual demands of the majority of them.

This has been repeated many times in history, but never, I believe, has there been such discord between people’s way of life and their outdated religious explanation of life’s meaning and resulting guidance for conduct, as there is now among the Christian nations who have not accepted the Christian doctrine revealed to them in its true meaning, but who live and continue to live their previous pagan existence.

I think this discord in the life of the Christian nations is particularly great because the explanation of the meaning of life that Christianity brought to men’s consciousness went far beyond the lifestyle of those who adopted it. The consequence of this was that the resulting guidance for conduct was too contradictory, not only to people’s habits, but to the whole mode of life of the pagan nations who accepted the Christian teaching.

This led to the striking disparity, immorality, impoverishment and folly of the way of life of the Christian nations.

It arose because the men of the Christian world, having accepted beneath the guise of Christianity a Church teaching which in its basic tenets differs from paganism only in its lack of sincerity and artificiality, very soon ceased to believe in the teaching and did not replace it with another. Thus the people of Christendom, having systematically liberated themselves from belief in the distorted Christian teachings, have finally reached the position in which they now find themselves wherein the majority of people have no explanation of the meaning of life: in other words, no religion, faith or common code of conduct. The largest section of the people, the working class, while externally following the old Church religion, no longer believe in it and are no longer guided by it; they simply cling to it out of habit, tradition and a sense of propriety. However on the whole the minority, the so-called educated classes, have either consciously ceased to believe in anything, or pretend, as some do, to believe in Christianity for political motives, or like the minute minority, sincerely believe in a teaching that is incompatible with life and lags behind it, and try to justify it through all sorts of complicated sophistries.

This is the chief and singular cause of the persisting state of misfortune in which today’s Christian nations find themselves. The miserable situation is worsened by the fact that, since this state of non-belief has already persisted for such a long time, the members of the Christian world for whom the position of non-belief is advantageous (all the ruling classes) either unscrupulously pretend to believe in something they do not believe in and cannot believe in, or else (and this is particularly true among the most corrupt of them, the scholars) they openly preach that the people of our time have absolutely no need of any explanation of the meaning of life, or of faith, or of any code of conduct resulting from it, and that the only fundamental law of life is the law of evolution and struggle for existence, and therefore human life should and must be guided only by human passions and desires.

The reason behind the misery of the people of the Christian world is the unconscious lack of faith of the masses, and the conscious denial of faith by the so-called educated people of the world.

(Source: Translated from Russian by EarthlyFireFlies and Wikisource.)